Blaming Collaborator Syndrome

Due to practical reasons like social status, job, income and security of one’s family and person, a person may have to work with an oppressor or a colonial power. This work can be related to one’s profession or just as a worker, soldier or clerk.

However, once this relationship has been established, the ‘collaborator’ finds himself making decisions that are questionable to his/her conscious mind. Even if the conscious mind is not paying much attention, the sub-conscious is busy at work trying to justify one’s actions. This is known to psychiatrists as {find term} – a kind of mechanism that keeps the internal balance intact. In some cases, this results in an active hatred of one’s own social group, religion, nationality – to justify the actions that one has to do.

For example, a Muslim doctor in the US who is treating soldiers returning from Iraq for PTSD (post-traumatic stress) has to wonder about the post-traumatic stress caused caused to the millions of Iraqi civilians whose families, businesses, lifestyle, buildings and homes have been shattered. He can consciously ignore it and argue that he has to perform his job and his professional duties, or he can consciously decide that since he is now an American citizen, he can suppress his ethnic, religious and national affiliations. Unless the doctor actually fulfils the true professional duties and takes part in an active effort to heal the phsyical and psychological wounds of the civilian victims, there is a good chance of falling to this syndrome.
For intelligent, professional people in empathetic professions (doctors, soldiers, lawyers, teachers) this dilemma will either make them traitors to their outward life, or traitors to their true affiliations, resulting in cost to either of the two sides.
The strangest manifestation of this is that the more empathetic the individual, the more outspoken he will be on the outside to suppress the screams of injsutice coming from his sub-conscious. And thus you will find him the most vocal and most derisive of the victims’ culture, religion and nationality.
With the right institutions to absorb this type of individual, he/she can be a great asset to the Renaissance, as all the years of guilt have to be repaid by the sub-sconscious.